The purported selling point here is so lazy and easy it's slutty: the
most anticipated star-studded action blockbuster 2012! Unless The
Thieves intends to pay homage to The Avengers, this year's only
rightful owner to that headline, we can't verify the credibility of
that audacious claim. Granted, the movie's A-list ensemble of the most
bankable stars from around the region places it in a perfect position
to sell itself to the usual fandom, but I'm usually sceptical of such
an approach to filmmaking. The good news? The Thieves is everything it
pledges to be in marketing and message  epic, smart, funny and well-
shot. The bad news? It's not quite everything it needs to be.

Hardened robber Macao Park wants to steal a $20 million diamond from a
casino in Macau. In order to pull off the perfect heist, he enlists the
services of Korean and Chinese thieves. What looks to be a smooth heist
suddenly shatters into a botched job as each thief begins to reveal
their true motives and lots of betrayals and grudges surface before any
thief can get to the diamond. The real winner here is Macao Park, who
has deliberately assembled this double-crossing team of thieves so that
he can escape with the diamond. Unfortunately, trouble catches up to
him before he can safely pocket the prize. Each thief must now fight to
survive and find the diamond before time runs out.

Let's face it: this is the sort of heist movie that can only look good
with a greedy scale, even if it's with one that's only initially
superficial. Director Choi Dong-hoon doesn't scrimp here, getting stars
from Korea, Hong Kong and Malaysia and wrangling with a multilingual
dialogue that speaks Korean, Mandarin, Japanese and English. It makes
for an amusing preamble that sees our group of thieves engage in almost
endless banter, effectively using the barriers of language to allow one
party to criticize the other without the other actually realising it.
The thieves eventually manage to pull their thinking caps together,
navigating through the complex security at the casino with an equally
cartoonish verve. So far, so good, right?

That question is important because the movie totally loses control once
it hits the second half. I'll admit upfront that the movie is very
smart  or at least its multitude of subplots is. But the fundamental
problem with The Thieves is that it has well over a dozen major
characters competing for screen time. I can't stress enough how a
burgeoning character count is to the detriment of a movie's quality.
With so many personal agendas / betrayals / grudges on offer, The
Thieves struggles to tie all its subplots into a concise, clear and
easily comprehensible script, instead allowing them to dart
uncontrollably in all directions. It's incredibly labourious to keep
track of who's doing what or even which diamond is real. Above all
else, The Thieves would have worked better as a TV serial; condensed
into movie length, it wears out any form of sanity too quickly.

That's not to say The Thieves isn't without any more charms. The movie
is a stacked deck of balletically choreographed action scenes that
become increasingly daring, and we dare say reckless, as it progresses.
Characters are allowed to fight in places that don't traditionally
grace the screen for action scenes, including an elevator shaft and the
surface of a building. There's an action scene which, in the perfect
storm of horrible coincidence, is virtually the same as Tom Cruise's
vertiginous adventure on the surface of Dubai's Burj Khalifa tower in
last year's Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. The only thing that's
better than this action segment is the relentless pace at which the
movie pumps out gunfire.

Watching The Thieves is like flirting with James Bond. You get a
curious mix of charisma and danger, and you don't know whether you
should stay or leave: the charisma is appealing, but the danger is
off-putting. The Thieves is far from perfection, but if you're willing
to overlook the messy second half and indulge in the amusement and
exhilaration of the package, then this so-called most anticipated
star-studded action blockbuster 2012 is worth a visit to the cinema.

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